Who will walk away with an Academy Award?

Guelph Mercury

It has been an eventful season. For the first time in recent memory, the best picture Academy Award hopefuls are broadly popular: with critics, with moviegoers and with members of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, who anointed a revolving list of titles with front-runner status in the months-long run-up to the Oscars.

The panoply of choices for best picture — at least six of the nine were true contenders — has made for lively debate and difficult decisions on the Oscar ballot.

On the performance-oriented Oscars broadcast, there will be the usual mix of kudos and surprises.

For instance, with five previous winners nominated (an Academy Awards first), the best supporting actor category is a tough one to call, and the competition for screenplay prizes gives writers more attention than they generally command in Hollywood.

The confounding list of directors chosen as nominees shook up the entire awards circuit, leaving room for one of the also-rans, Ben Affleck, to make a stronger case for his movie, Argo (with a little help from one of its producers, George Clooney). But that does little to clarify who will be named best director.

The other best picture options include a debut feature made with non-professionals on a shoestring budget far outside the celebrity-industrial complex. But as paradox would have it, Hollywood embraced the resulting movie, Beasts of the Southern Wild, enthusiastically. Its 30-year-old director, Benh Zeitlin, was welcomed with champagne by none other than Steven Spielberg, who was about the same age when he first became an Oscar nominee. And the film’s star, nine-year-old Quvenzhane Wallis, has rewritten the rules for ingenues with her preternatural ease in the spotlight.

Also operating outside the system, but currying favour with Oscar voters is Amour, Michael Haneke’s sober meditation on love and aging. Its star, Emmanuelle Riva (who turns 86 on Sunday), may pull off a surprise best actress victory, as much for her earliest roles in seminal films of the 1960s French new wave like Hiroshima Mon Amour as for her newest work. And there’s a possibility that Haneke may also be given a career best prize for his screenplay. Esthetes who argue that the Academy does not appreciate haute cinema (French accented, even) can now stand corrected.

Of course, many of the marquee prizes will most likely go to more standard fare: a musical, a thriller, a stark procedural, a biopic, a revenge fantasy, a romance, a fable. Even in that group, though, there were some unorthodox choices.

Tom Hooper’s tight close-ups of the singing cast of Les Miserables didn’t work for everyone, but when they did — as in Anne Hathaway’s performance as Fantine, widely expected to land her a best supporting actress prize — they were the definition of a memorable screen moment.

After the success of The Fighter, David O. Russell once again proved that he can turn a traditional story, in this case the boy-meets-girl of Silver Linings Playbook, into something offbeat, talkative and compelling, prompting career-defining turns from Bradley Cooper, Jennifer Lawrence and even Robert De Niro, and making Russell a dark horse in the adapted screenplay contest.

Mark Boal and Kathryn Bigelow got criticism for their dramatization of the hunt for Osama bin Laden in Zero Dark Thirty, but there’s no question that venturing into such recent history is bold filmmaking.

Which brings us, naturally, to Quentin Tarantino. Django Unchained, the latest entry in his canon of anachronistic genre mash-ups, is perhaps the Tarantino-iest film since Pulp Fiction. A profane and stylish shoot ‘em up driven by a couple of good guys gone bad, or vice versa, Django can’t claim moralism as its strong suit, but the dialogue snaps.

Boal and Tarantino are both gunning for a best original screenplay Oscar — which would be the second for both, though Boal (The Hurt Locker) earned his more recently than Tarantino (Pulp Fiction). Add in Haneke and this may be the tightest match of the night.

Morality was at the centre of Lincoln, and so was Tony Kushner’s artfully historical language, especially when delivered, in lengthy monologues, by Daniel Day-Lewis (or barked by Tommy Lee Jones). In tackling Lincoln Spielberg, the most lauded of this year’s crop of filmmakers, admitted serious trepidation; the subject matter, even to him, seemed too grand. But 12 Oscar nominations suggest he did just fine.

Day-Lewis was so indelible as Lincoln that he will probably soon be the first man with three best actor statuettes to his name — and the first performer in one of Spielberg’s films to win an Oscar.

Still, insiders say Spielberg is not the front-runner for the best director trophy, nor Kushner for best adapted screenplay. Their film — like many others in the race — had its detractors, who complained it was too long, too dry, too much of a history lesson. And the campaign his studio ran to woo Oscar voters was judged as heavy-handed, including an appearance by Bill Clinton at the Golden Globes, to solidify the idea that this was A Consequential Film.

By contrast, Ang Lee’s Life of Pi was a visual feast with an appealing, uplifting message. It earned fans for its technical wows and for Lee’s vision in turning what seemed like a profoundly unfilmable story into a theatrical event, in 3D no less. It is a directorial achievement, several awards prognosticators noted, and it happens to have earned more than $500 million worldwide. With several other competitors, like Bigelow and Affleck, out of the director’s race, it may be Lee’s to lose.

It’s been a strong year at the box office for nearly all the nominees — six have already crossed the $100 million mark, in contrast to just one, The Help, last year — and that may well translate into higher ratings for the telecast.

Campaigning for his film with the real-life inspiration for his character, Tony Mendez, at his side, Affleck revealed himself to be charming, funny and knowledgeable on the Oscar circuit. His comeback story, from phenom to tabloid staple to lauded director, proved irresistible. And in a year when there were a lot of films with both passionate defenders and critics, Argo, about the cinematic plot to help hostages escape the 1970s Iran hostage crisis, emerged as a consensus choice, a feel-good caper that was hard to poke holes in. (Not that a few people in Tehran didn’t try.)

As it racked up the precursor honours, some awards-watchers were puzzled. But will it be any wonder if it takes the best picture prize? In Argo, after all, Hollywood saves the day.